Encode the decisions you'd otherwise repeat
You capture the decisions behind a task—like extracting a payment-handling function into its own module—so the agent reuses them instead of making you repeat yourself.
Agentic AI Coding / Intermediate
Context Engineering for Coders
Feed agents your codebase, docs, and rules so they stop guessing and start writing code that fits your project.
The problem
It starts with the situation you're actually in.
You diagnose why capable coding agents still invent variable names, ignore conventions, and drift mid-task as their context windows fill. You map the failure modes—context rot, the "dumb zone," and overconfident wrong answers—against your own recent sessions and pinpoint where missing context, not a weak prompt, caused the miss.
You end up with a collection of working parts: a rules file the agent reads on every task, a checklist for assembling the right files, triggers for when to compress or reset a window, isolation patterns for splitting work across sub-agents, and a governance charter so your team shares one standard. Each part works on its own.
Outcomes
What you'll be able to do.
Relevance Beats Volume
You feed the agent only the single validator that owns a check when you tighten one validation rule, instead of letting it pull in half the forms/ directory—three form classes, a serializer, two utility modules, and a batch of tests.
Decomposition Is Context Hygiene, Not Org Chart Cosplay
You split one agent's three jobs—understand the payment module, refactor it, write tests—so the window isn't crammed with dead-end files, a stack trace, and two abandoned approaches by the time it reaches the test code.
The Gap Between Using and Governing
You turn the private prompt fixes buried in your team's chat—the one that "finally got the agent to stop touching the auth module"—into a shared standard instead of scattered one-off messages.
Inside the book
A closer look at the work inside.
The Session Autopsy
You pull your three most recent agent sessions that produced output you had to correct and fill in the autopsy worksheet for each: the task you asked for, what the agent produced, what was wrong with it, and the missing knowledge—what did the agent assume?
Separate the Prompt Miss from the Context Miss
Before you rewrite a single instruction, you classify the failure. If the agent did exactly what you said but you said the wrong thing, that's a prompt miss—fix the wording. If it did something reasonable for a project it couldn't see, that's a context miss—fix the supply. Most failures in a mature codebase are context misses.
Reading One of Your Own Sessions
You open your most recent session where the output missed and ask what the agent didn't know that a competent new hire would have looked up. Say you asked it to add a field to an API response, and it returned working code that placed validation logic inline in the route handler.
Score One Real Task
You pick a single task you'll actually give an agent this week—a bug fix, a small feature, a refactor—and before writing the prompt, score your current default approach on each lever from 0 to 3, where 0 means "I do nothing here" and 3 means "I do this deliberately every time.".
Case Study: Two Windows, One Task
You ask an agent to add rate limiting to an existing API endpoint, then run it two ways. In Window A you spend four minutes wording the request: role framing, a request to "follow best practices," and an example of clean rate-limiting code from a blog.
Context Engineering for Coders frameworkInside the book
Visual preview
A diagram you can keep open while you work.
Table of contents
8 chapters, built to be read in order.
01
Why Your Agent Guesses
02
From Prompting to Context Engineering
03
Writing the Rules File Your Agent Reads
04
Feeding the Codebase Without Drowning the Window
05
Compression and the Art of the Fresh Window
06
Isolating Work with Sub-Agents
07
Governing Context Across a Team
08
Your Context Engineering System
174
Pages
13,606
Words
31
Exercises, checklists & tools
8
Chapters
Formats
Three formats. One purchase.
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Complete guide
Context Engineering for Coders
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Questions, answered.
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